The White House; Regan's Raiders Stir Up Some Resentment

Within the White House they are called -with a blend of humor and chilly derision - the Regan Mafia.

''I don't believe it's true,'' Alfred H. Kingon, a key aide to Donald T. Regan, the White House chief of staff, said with a laugh this afternoon, then shrugged. ''An overstatement!''

Seated beside Mr. Kingon, a 54-year-old Brooklyn native who holds the title of Cabinet Secretary, were the other members of the group that now controls virtually all paperwork to President Reagan, decides who sees the chief of staff and the President, selects which staff aides sit in on policy meetings and oversees the functioning of the White House under Mr. Regan.

Although relatively unknown figures outside Washington and even within the city, the Regan aides have emerged as some of the most powerful figures in the Reagan Presidency and, in the process, have evoked unusually intense anger and resentment among some key White House aides.

Four Loyalists From Treasury

The Regan group is made up of four loyalists who worked for Mr. Regan when he was Treasury Secretary.

Three of the four came to the White House last January when he assumed the chief of staff's job: Mr. Kingon, a former editor in chief of Financial World and Saturday Review, who now serves as the central White House link with Government agencies and will probably take over White House domestic policy efforts in the next six months; David L. Chew, a 33-year-old deputy Presidential assistant who oversees the ''paper flow'' to Mr. Reagan, and Thomas C. Dawson, 37, another deputy Presidential assistant who serves as executive aide to Mr. Reagan. The fourth, M. Dennis Thomas, 41, was appointed last week to a vaguely defined role as Mr. Regan's overall deputy and will work, in effect, as the chief of staff's ''eyes and ears'' and perhaps key adviser.

In cementing their control over the operations of the White House, these aides have privately provoked some acid and blunt criticisms within the corridors of the West Wing.

White House officials decline to criticize the aides for the record, but some say Mr. Regan's staff is more reactive to the front pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post than they are innovative on policy. They also say some of the Regan aides are overbearing in selecting who sees the chief of staff or who attends and does not attend staff meetings.

Some officials also complain that Mr. Regan has arrogated so much power to himself that the policy coming out of the White House is more his than President Reagan's. Moreover, these critics say that by relying on only a handful of aides, Mr. Regan is in danger of isolating himself and not receiving a wide range of information.

Such comments are vehemently denied by the Regan aides.

''Here's a guy who comes in at the crack of dawn and doesn't stop until he leaves at night,'' Mr. Kingon said. ''Sometimes you can't get in to see him. That includes me and anybody else. You eventually do see him, if not one day, then the next. If you have a legitimate reason to see him, you do.''

Several prominent aides are said to be disgruntled with the working of the White House, including Patrick J. Buchanan, director of the Office of Communications; Edward J. Rollins, assistant to the President for political and governmental affairs, and John A. Svahn, head of policy development. Even Robert C. McFarlane, the national security adviser, was said by one official to be miffed because his daily 15-minute private meeting with Mr. Reagan is also attended by Mr. Regan. Two who are known to be pleased with Mr. Regan's control over operations are Larry Speakes, the White House spokesman, and Fred F. Fielding, the White House counsel.

''My access has improved dramatically under Regan,'' Mr. Speakes said. ''He believes the spokesman should be involved. The doors have really been opened to me. I'm very comfortable in my relationship with the chief of staff, more so than I've ever been before.''

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To Mr. Regan's aides, who meet regularly among themselves amid much personal bantering (Mr. Chew's tuna fish and American cheese lunches stir considerable amusement), the tensions within the White House are both a natural result of a powerful chief like Mr. Regan running the show and a refusal by some White House officials to acknowledge his dominance as the most powerful figure in the White House after the President.

In the first Reagan term three dominant aides controlled the White House: James A. Baker 3d, Michael K. Deaver and Edwin Meese 3d. Mr. Regan has now assumed the powers of all three.

''Look,'' Mr. Kingon said, ''Don Regan is a very open, collegial guy. He has legislative strategy group meetings at 8 in the morning in his office and the place is packed. You can't even sit around the table. You want in, you get in.''

''Frankly,'' he continued, ''there are people who are holdovers from the first term who find it uncomfortable to stand up at 8 in the morning when they were used to going to Ed Meese or Jim Baker or Mike Deaver. When they lost a decision, people shopped around and tried to reverse it. That doesn't happen now. Some people don't like it.''

The Regan aides themselves are studies in contrast.

Mr. Kingon is low-keyed and tends to play down his emerging power, although when his secretary walked in in the middle of an interview, he murmured that ''the order of calls'' he wanted were ''Stockman, Baker, Block and Meese.'' Mr. Dawson, lanky and rumpled, is somewhat acerbic. Mr. Chew declines to speak publicly and shies away from reporters. Mr. Thomas, a former legislative aide to Mr. Regan at the Treasury Department, is known as a shrewd figure popular on Capitol Hill and in Republican circles.

Mr. Thomas brushed aside a suggestion that his recent appointment was perhaps a result of a realization by Mr. Regan that the White House staff was in some disarray and turmoil.

A 'Natural Evolution'

''What's I've tried to do is visit with everybody and frankly ask where the problem is,'' he said. ''If there's warfare, I haven't been exposed to it.'' He described himself as a ''facilitator'' in behalf of the staff and Mr. Regan, and he said there was a ''natural evolution'' within the White House whenever a new chief of staff appeared.

Mr. Dawson said it was unfair to assert, as some White House officials do, that access to Mr. Regan is highly selective and limited. ''If anyone within the senior level of Government wants to see him, they do,'' he said. ''Mr. Regan controls who sees Mr. Regan.''

Mr. Thomas indicated he expected the job to be an exhausting one. Gazing at the lanky Mr. Dawson, Mr. Thomas laughed, then said: ''He used to be 300 pounds when he got here.''

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A version of this article appears in print on July 25, 1985, on Page A00020 of the National edition with the headline: The White House; Regan's Raiders Stir Up Some Resentment. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe